Robert McGowan Littlejohn was born in South Carolina in 1890. He attended Clemson College and graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1912. He served in the Philippines and on the Mexican border from 1912-1917 and was an instructor at West Point in  1917. He then served in France and Germany in 1918, where he commanded a machine gun battalion during World War I. He transferred to the Quartermaster Corps in 1920.  He graduated from the Quartermaster Corps Subsistence School in 1925; attended the Command and General Staff School in 1929; and Army War College in 1930.  He was on the General Staff of the War Department 1930-1934; was Post Quartermaster at West Point, 1934-38; served in Manila and the Philippines 1938-1940. Early in World War II, Littlejohn, then a colonel, was put in charge of providing uniforms for the rapidly expanding U.S. Army. He was promoted to brigadier general shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In 1942, he went to England as the Quartermaster General of the European Theatre of Operations (ETO) serving as chief quartermaster on Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s staff, preparing the more than two million soldiers for the 1944 invasion of France in World War II.   He was promoted to major general that year.   Littlejohn had to completely re-equip the better part of a million soldiers while still in the early stages of the campaign. The breakout and pursuit that followed only intensified pressure on the Chief Quartermaster.  By September the Allies were required to deliver to forward areas no less than 20,000 tons of supplies daily.  During his tenure as Quartermaster General of the ETO, Littlejohn earned a reputation for marked aggressiveness, exceptional organizing ability, and a superior quality of leadership in rapidly establishing a quartermaster service throughout the theatre which met and solved the many unexpected and seemingly insurmountable problems of supply. For his services as Quartermaster General, Littlejohn was awarded the Army Distinguished Service Medal with a Bronze Oak Leaf Cluster, the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star Medal, and foreign awards that included the British Order of the Bath, French Croix de Guerre and Dutch Order of Orange Nassau.  MG Littlejohn retired in 1946, at which time President Truman named him administrator of the War Assets Administration, the purpose of which was to dispose of some $34 billion in surplus government property. He remained in that post until 1948. Thereafter, Major General Littlejohn devoted himself to contributing to the official Department of the Army history of the Quartermaster Corps.